Equity is Not Equality: Why UGC’s Equity Rules Matter

The UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026 arrive in a political moment marked by institutional retreat rather than resolve, and their scope reflects that constraint. These are cautious in ambition and incomplete in design, yet their very existence signals a fragile acknowledgement of injustice within higher education.

To read these Regulations uncritically would be naïve, but to dismiss them outright would be equally irresponsible. At a time when minorities and marginalised communities are routinely left without effective institutional support, even a limited articulation of equity acquires significance, not as an accomplishment, but as a contested ground. Any framework that fails to protect those rendered vulnerable by both caste hierarchy and religious majoritarianism may remain procedurally intact while standing morally depleted. It is from this unsettled terrain that the present discussion proceeds.

The legal challenge to the UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026 has been framed as a defence of equality. It asks why caste-based discrimination should be recognised only when it affects Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes (SC, ST, OBC), and why discrimination should not instead be defined in a “neutral” manner, applicable to all.

This framing misidentifies both the problem and the stakes. Here’s why:

Judicial Origins and Regulatory Ambivalence

These Regulations did not arise organically from executive resolve. These were shaped by sustained judicial concern over persistent discrimination in higher education, including proceedings that followed the institutional deaths of Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi. The Supreme Court was correct to observe that earlier anti-discrimination frameworks were weak, loosely enforced, and easily evaded.

However, tightening a regulatory framework does not automatically strengthen justice. As several legal scholars have noted, the increased emphasis on procedural architecture and enforceability has also diluted some core substantive commitments of anti-discrimination law. This unresolved tension, between procedure and protection, has been displaced by a public debate focused instead on neutrality and “reverse discrimination”.

Discrimination Under the 2026 Regulations

The 2026 Regulations define discrimination broadly as unfair, differential, or biased treatment, explicit or implicit, on grounds including religion, caste, gender, race, place of birth, and disability. This definition is significant not merely for its breadth, but for its recognition that discrimination in universities often operates through everyday institutional practices rather than overt exclusion.

The explicit inclusion of religion is particularly important in the present context. Indian universities are not insulated from the communalisation of public life. Muslim students and scholars increasingly encounter suspicion, surveillance, moral scrutiny, and selective vulnerability. Religious discrimination rarely manifests as formal prohibition; it operates through informal complaints, hostel exclusions, classroom silences, administrative discretion, and the quiet marking of certain bodies as permanently suspect.

Religion, Gender, and Caste: An Intersectional Reality

Crucially, religious discrimination on campuses does not operate as an independent axis of disadvantage. It interacts with gender and caste to produce compounded forms of exclusion, where constraints accumulate rather than offset one another. For example, Muslim women students face a distinctive configuration of penalties, they are simultaneously positioned as religious outsiders, subjected to moral regulation, and rendered hyper-visible within academic and social spaces. This combination increases both social scrutiny and institutional risk, narrowing access to informal academic networks, mentorship, and symbolic legitimacy.

Similarly, Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim students experience an even steeper intersectional penalty, shaped by the joint operation of caste hierarchy and religious marginalisation. In such cases exclusion is not additive, it multiplies, intensifying vulnerability across academic evaluation, administrative interaction, and peer environments, often in ways that escape institutional recognition or redress. These examples are not isolated cases but structural barriers that depress educational returns and limit institutional mobility.

Such patterns of exclusion cannot be captured through single-axis definitions of discrimination. These require an intersectional framework that recognises how caste, religion, and gender interact to generate layered disadvantages and unequal exposure to risk. Abstract appeals to neutrality obscure these dynamics, treating unequal constraints as equivalent and thereby reproducing the very exclusions equity frameworks are meant to address.

Why Caste Cannot Be Made “Neutral”

Caste discrimination in India is a structure of power, historically entrenched and institutionally reproduced. Universities were built on the ideal of equal opportunity in higher education, but as they developed within a deeply stratified society, historical and inherent social discriminations were replicated within them. On campuses, caste discrimination rarely announces itself through explicit exclusion. It appears instead through everyday delegitimization, such as persistent questioning of merit, denial or delay of supervision, obstruction of fellowships, exclusion from informal academic networks, and the normalisation of humiliation.

Read Also: They Chose Death over Humiliation

The institutional death of Rohith Vemula made this reality impossible to ignore. Rohith was not expelled by statute. He was suspended, socially boycotted, deprived of his fellowship, and ultimately abandoned by an institution unwilling to recognise caste as the organising principle of its own violence. His exclusion was cumulative, bureaucratic, and sanitised, the most recognisable form of structural discrimination.

To demand that caste discrimination be defined in a “neutral” manner is to deny this history. It collapses structural oppression into individual discomfort and equates marginalisation with the loss of privilege. Such neutrality obscures power rather than correcting injustice.

Equality Is Not Uniform Treatment

The insistence on caste-neutral protection rests on a narrow conception of equality as sameness. Indian constitutional jurisprudence has long rejected this view. Equality, as envisaged by the Constitution, is substantive, it recognises that unequal histories produce unequal vulnerabilities. Treating unequals alike does not remedy injustice; it entrenches it. Protective measures grounded in social reality are not deviations from equality; they are the conditions under which equality becomes meaningful.

Claims that the Regulations may be used to unduly target upper-caste individuals do not withstand textual or empirical scrutiny. The Regulations do not presume guilt, impose collective penalties, or deny grievance redressal on other recognised grounds. The more serious concern is whether the framework adequately protects SC/ST/OBC students, women, and religious minorities from institutional retaliation, bureaucratic evasion, and procedural exhaustion, the most common mechanisms through which discrimination persists on campuses.

Any discussion on these Regulations must remember that Anti-discrimination laws were never meant to protect the privileged. Their essence lies in protecting the vulnerable. If discrimination is defined so expansively that it applies equally to everyone, it becomes legally hollow. Institutions lose the capacity to identify harm, assign responsibility, and offer redress. The result is policy paralysis, precisely what entrenched hierarchies rely on. Equity demands precision. It requires naming power, not pretending it does not exist.

Conclusion

The UGC’s Equity Regulations represent a constrained but necessary intervention in an era being shaped by entrenched hierarchies and deepening majoritarian power. By acknowledging caste, religion, gender, and their intersections as axes of discrimination, the Regulations are able to identify how exclusion is actually produced and sustained. Defending this framework is an insistence that the language of equity must be held on to in times when it is most inconvenient to power. Without an equity framework attentive to caste hierarchy, religious majoritarianism, and gendered exclusion, equality remains a only a rhetorical gesture that cannot be achieved.

The writer is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.